Pangolin Scales and Traditional Medicine Demand

The pangolin is the world's most trafficked wild mammal. At the centre of that crisis sits a single commodity: the scales that cover its body from nose to tail. Every year, thousands of pangolins are killed so that their scales can enter trade networks supplying markets in China, Vietnam and beyond. Understanding pangolin scales and traditional medicine demand requires looking at both the biology and chemistry of scales and at the deep cultural forces that sustain consumer demand despite a near-total scientific consensus that those scales confer no medical benefit.

What Pangolin Scales Are Made Of

Pangolin scales are modified hairs fused into hard, overlapping plates. They begin forming before birth and continue to harden throughout the animal's life. Chemically, they are composed almost entirely of keratin — the same fibrous structural protein that makes up human fingernails, hair and the hooves of horses. Minor quantities of calcium, phosphorus and trace minerals are also present, but no biologically active compound unique to pangolin scales has been identified by analytical chemistry.

The keratin in pangolin scales is structurally similar to the keratin in bovine hooves or sheep horn. When hydrolysed — broken down by boiling, as traditional preparation methods prescribe — the resulting amino acid mixture is essentially the same as that obtained from any other keratin-rich material. There is no pharmacological basis for believing that scales sourced from pangolins have properties absent from far more abundant, legally obtained animal or synthetic keratin.

The Scientific Consensus on Medicinal Benefit

Multiple systematic reviews of the biomedical literature have examined claims made for pangolin scales in traditional pharmacopoeias. The findings are consistent: pangolin scales have no proven medical benefit. Investigators searching for anti-inflammatory, anticoagulant, galactagogue (milk-stimulating) or wound-healing activity in scale extracts have either found no statistically significant effect in controlled conditions or have identified effects that could not be distinguished from those produced by hydrolysed keratin from other sources.

The World Health Organization's guidelines on traditional medicine acknowledge the cultural importance of indigenous healing systems while also emphasising that safety and efficacy must be evaluated by evidence-based methods. Pangolin scale preparations have not met that standard. Medical researchers have urged practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine to adopt scientifically validated substitutes, noting that continued use of scales both harms a critically endangered animal and exposes patients to treatments of unproven worth.

Why the Myth Persists

Medical claims in traditional systems are typically transmitted through texts compiled over centuries. Pangolin scales appear in the Chinese materia medica under the name chuanshanjia and have been associated with promoting blood circulation, reducing swelling and stimulating lactation since at least the Tang dynasty. Once a remedy is embedded in an authoritative canon and reinforced by generations of practitioners, it acquires cultural weight that empirical counter-evidence alone is slow to displace — a pattern familiar in the history of medicine in every culture worldwide.

Uses in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Vietnamese Traditional Medicine

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, pangolin scales are typically dried, roasted or vinegar-fried before being powdered and added to decoctions. The most commonly cited indications include:

• Promoting the movement of blood and dissolving blood stasis
• Reducing swelling and draining abscesses
• Stimulating lactation in nursing mothers
• Treating skin conditions including psoriasis and eczema
• Alleviating menstrual irregularity

In Vietnamese traditional medicine — thuoc nam and thuoc bac traditions — pangolin scales serve broadly similar purposes and are sometimes combined with herbal preparations prescribed for rheumatic pain and fever.

It is worth stressing that practitioners and patients within these traditions are not acting in bad faith. They are drawing on medical systems that predate modern pharmacology by many centuries and that carry significant cultural authority. The challenge for conservation and public health alike is to redirect that tradition toward remedies that are both effective and sustainable.

Volume of Trade: Seizures and Estimated True Scale

Tracking illegal trade in pangolin scales is inherently difficult because only a fraction of shipments are intercepted. Seizure data nonetheless provides a lower-bound estimate of the trade's magnitude.

Law enforcement agencies and academic researchers using detection-rate modelling estimate that seized quantities represent between five and twenty percent of actual trade flows. On that basis, the true volume of pangolin scales entering markets annually during peak years may have equalled or exceeded one thousand tonnes — equivalent to over two million individual pangolins per decade across all eight species. The pangolin scale demand from China accounts for the largest share of that consumption, though Vietnam functions as both a significant consumer market and a transit hub.

For a detailed breakdown of the routes through which scales move from source to consumer, see the pangolin scale trade supply chain analysis on this site.

CITES Appendix I Listing and the Trade Ban

At the 17th Conference of the Parties to CITES, held in Johannesburg in 2016, all eight pangolin species were transferred from Appendix II — which allows regulated commercial trade — to Appendix I, which prohibits all commercial international trade. The decision reflected scientific assessments showing that pangolin populations across Africa and Asia had declined precipitously and could not sustain commercial harvesting pressure.

The Appendix I listing means that no country may legally export or import pangolin scales, live animals or any body part for commercial purposes. Exceptions exist only for non-commercial scientific research and for pre-Convention specimens, which are tightly regulated. Despite this, illegal trade has continued at scale, demonstrating that CITES listings — while essential — must be accompanied by domestic enforcement, demand reduction and community engagement to be fully effective.

How Traditional Medicine Demand Drives Poaching Across Africa and Asia

Because consumer demand has not fallen in proportion to the trade ban, criminal networks have adapted rather than collapsed. The primary effect of tightening enforcement at end-market borders has been to push trade deeper underground, inflate black-market prices and, paradoxically, to increase the pressure on wild populations as higher prices justify more intensive poaching effort.

African Species Under Pressure

Africa's two most heavily trafficked species are the white-bellied pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis) and the giant ground pangolin (Smutsia gigantea). Temminck's ground pangolin (Smutsia temminckii), found across southern and eastern Africa, also faces significant poaching pressure. Syndicate networks source animals from Central and West Africa, dry and process scales in transit countries, and ship consignments to Asian markets concealed in mixed cargo containers. The sophistication of these operations mirrors the organised crime networks that traffic drugs and weapons.

Asian Species at Critically Low Levels

The Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) and the Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) were historically the primary sources for Asian consumer markets. Both are now listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN. As Asian populations collapsed, traffickers pivoted to African species to meet demand — a pattern sometimes called the "spillover effect" that illustrates how pangolin scale demand in China and Vietnam extends its ecological footprint across continents.

China's 2020 Pharmacopoeia Decision: An Important Milestone

In June 2020, China's National Medical Products Administration removed pangolin scales from the official list of approved ingredients in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia — a landmark decision that represented the most significant regulatory step taken by any major consumer country to address demand at source. The pharmacopoeia is updated every five years and guides the formulations that licensed TCM manufacturers may produce and sell. Removal from that list does not immediately eliminate use — practitioners can still recommend scale preparations — but it withdraws official state endorsement and, crucially, limits the ability of large pharmaceutical manufacturers to legally incorporate scales into mass-produced medicines.

The decision followed sustained advocacy by conservation organisations, scientific bodies and a growing cohort of TCM practitioners who recognised that the profession's credibility was being damaged by association with the illegal wildlife trade. It signalled that influential voices within the TCM community itself were willing to distinguish between practices grounded in clinical evidence and those maintained by tradition alone.

Cultural and Social Drivers Behind Demand

Reducing demand for pangolin scales requires understanding why people buy them in the first place. Demand is rarely monolithic; it is shaped by a constellation of factors that vary by geography, generation and social context.

Belief in Efficacy

For many consumers, especially older generations who grew up in households where TCM was the primary form of healthcare, the efficacy of scale preparations is simply not in question. It is as self-evident as the efficacy of aspirin is to a Western patient. Challenging that belief requires trusted messengers — ideally respected TCM practitioners — rather than confrontational public campaigns.

Rarity and Prestige

As pangolins have become rarer and their scales more expensive, the commodity has acquired a prestige dimension. Purchasing pangolin-derived medicines or serving pangolin meat at a banquet signals wealth and social status. This dynamic is not unique to China or Vietnam — the same mechanism operates wherever scarcity drives up the perceived value of a product — but it complicates straightforward price-based demand reduction strategies, since higher prices can paradoxically increase desirability.

Gift Giving

In some contexts, pangolin products are purchased not for personal use but as gifts for elderly relatives, superiors or business associates. Demand reduction messages must therefore reach gift-givers, not only end consumers.

Conservation Organisations and Demand Reduction Efforts

A range of organisations is working to reduce the consumer demand that drives pangolin poaching. Their approaches are complementary rather than identical.

• TRAFFIC — the wildlife trade monitoring network — produces market research and policy briefings, supports enforcement capacity building, and co-develops demand reduction communication strategies with governments and community groups in China, Vietnam and other consumer countries.
• WildAid operates high-profile public awareness campaigns in China, partnering with celebrities and social media influencers to shift cultural norms around wildlife consumption. Their pangolin campaigns have reached hundreds of millions of viewers.
• Save Pangolins focuses on education and community engagement, producing materials in multiple languages that explain both the ecological importance of pangolins and the lack of scientific support for scale remedies.
• IUCN Pangolin Specialist Group coordinates scientific research, red-list assessments and field conservation programmes across the eight species' range states, providing the evidence base on which policy interventions depend.
• African Pangolin Working Group operates primarily in southern Africa, combining anti-poaching support, rehabilitation of confiscated animals and community outreach programmes that give local people a stake in pangolin survival.

These efforts are complemented by government-to-government engagement through the Convention on Biological Diversity and bilateral conservation partnerships. The 2020 pharmacopoeia decision in China is widely cited as evidence that sustained, respectful advocacy directed at decision-makers within traditional medicine institutions can yield concrete policy change.

To read more about the full range of conservation efforts across the continent, visit the AlphaPanga blog for articles on pangolin rehabilitation, anti-poaching initiatives and ecotourism.

What Needs to Happen Next

The trajectory of pangolin trade since the CITES Appendix I uplisting suggests that legal prohibition, while necessary, is insufficient on its own. Sustainable progress requires action on three fronts simultaneously.

First, enforcement must continue to improve — not only at borders and ports, but against the syndicate leaders and financial networks that organise and profit from trafficking. Prosecuting low-level poachers while leaving networks intact does not address the structural drivers of supply.

Second, demand reduction must be funded, evidence-based and culturally informed. Campaigns that demonise consumers or dismiss entire medical traditions are less effective than those that work with respected TCM practitioners to promote scientifically validated alternatives and reframe scale use as incompatible with the values of a modern, responsible medical profession.

Third, source-country communities that live alongside pangolins must benefit economically from their survival. When local people bear the cost of conservation — forgoing bushmeat, risking conflict with poaching gangs — without sharing in its benefits, long-term coexistence is fragile. Community-based conservation models that deliver tangible returns to villagers have shown consistent results in shifting attitudes and behaviours.

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